Power of hesitation
What makes a human a human?
Title: Forever Odd
Written by: Dean Koontz (딘 쿤츠)
Notes: Mystery novel. Second book in <Odd Thomas> Series.
Cover image of "Forever Odd"이 책은 원서 <Forever Odd>를 읽고 쓴 감상이다. 우리말로 된 독후감은 아래 링크에 있다.
I already wrote the plot, summary and my impression about this book in Korean. (There's a link above) So, instead of repeating myself in English here, I'd like to focus on one part of this book that made me think hard for several days afterwards.
Imagine this. You and a bad man are in the same building. He's a killer, and he has a gun. He's chasing you. But he doesn't know that you have a gun, too. When you're near the stairs, you heard his footsteps, ascending from lower floors. He doesn't know that you're waiting on top of the stairs. This is a quite confined stairwell, so even you who are not familiar with guns cannot fail to shoot him and give him fatal wounds, if not immediate death. What would you do?
That was a gloomy situation. Let's try something else. You and a bad woman are facing each other, about 12 feet apart. She's evil, she's a killer. Unfortunately, she has a gun, and you don't. She's threatening your life with that gun. You just wish it would be quick and without much pain. Then suddenly, a big mountain lion appeared from her behind without her knowing it. It looks like it's about to attack her before the bullet from her gun travels toward you. What would you do?
Both of the questions seem very simple, don't they? You would just shoot him in the first case because attack is the best defence. And for the second case, you would run away while the mountain lion is about to pounce upon her. But in this book <Forever Odd>, our hero Odd acted differently, suiting his name.
In the first case, instead of shooting the killer, he ran away, because "Necessity had driven me to take the weapon, but I wasn't keen to use it. The gun would be a last resort, not a first option" as he put it. And even though he believed that the bad woman "deserved to be imprisoned" or "execution", and he "had the right – the obligation – to kill her" to save himself and his friend, he hesitated before turning his back on her when the mountain lion approached its prey. Because he also believed that "no one deserves as hideous a death as being mauled and eaten alive by a wild beast" and "regardless of the circumstances, perhaps it is indefensible to allow such a fate to unfold to the point of inevitability when the potential victim, armed with a gun, could save herself if warned."
The first thing I thought about his action (or rather inaction) was "What are you doing? Shoot him. Kill him before he kills you. Flee while the mountain lion's having his dinner. Run away before it considers you as a dessert. Let the bad people die. Give us readers some catharsis. Show us some justice served!"
But the next thing that came to my mind was that I must have watched too many Hollywood movies. Killing someone, taking a man's life at your own hands is not an easy thing to do. Even if he's a bad man.
What makes a human a human?
Odd Thomas asks you, "Is it acceptable to kill a man just because he's evil?"
Even if he's a very, very, very bad man, he's still a man. A person. A human being, no matter how inhuman he might be. Can you kill a person? Can you let a man eaten alive by a mountain lion? I don't know. Probably I'll hesitate, too. Maybe I'm only saying this because I'm sitting on a sofa in a safe house without any evil man armed with a gun. But Odd, he hesitated at the top of the stairs, and in front of a gunned woman. That’s something.
I think good books give you some answers, solutions, and perspective. And fine books give you some questions to ponder. Now it's my turn to find some answers to them.
